It’s September 1986 in Communist Romania, and Lili Danes is an eighteen-year-old student in her final year of school, preparing for university entrance exams that are the key to the rest of her life. She is going to study physics, and she gets her affinity for the subject from her once-beloved father, Dimi Danes, a well-known and beloved physics professor. Dimi has, however, struggled over the years with personal opinions that diverge from the university’s nationalist expectations, and he has become fractious and withdrawn. As a result, Lili feels entirely alone on this journey to becoming an adult and struggles to find meaning in school, friends, and herself. She suffers setbacks in her journey toward university that make her question everything, but she also meets and becomes involved with Vlad, who gives her a taste of a higher social sphere. She has to untangle who she is, what she wants, and the choices she’s making to find what really matters, and to find herself amidst it all.
Lili Comes to Herself by Zoe Carada is a beautiful coming-of-age story that will remind readers of how it felt to be eighteen and on the edge of everything. Lili is a beautiful soul trying to find her place in the world, and despite her giftedness in an extraordinarily difficult subject, is immediately relatable. Her goodness is pure, and partly why she struggles so much to fit in and find her place. Another reason for her difficulties is working within the communist system that her father railed so hard against. She comes to understand him more as she, too, has to navigate a system that doesn’t allow her to be her whole self. Lili is a thought-provoking and immersive read that takes us to places we’ve never been and through experiences we’ll never have, while still telling a story we can truly relate to. This is a story that readers will be thinking about well after they’ve finished the book. I highly recommend Lili Comes to Herself to readers interested in deeply personal stories, cultural exploration, clever writing, and philosophical questions.
This book will launch on 12 December and I will provide links to it on Amazon and Reedsy Discovery at that time.
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